Review -ASIT (Advanced Systematic Inventive Thinking)

ASIT Premier is unusual - it's not a software product to support creativity, but rather an online training course in using ASIT, a creativity methodology based on TRIZ.

There are two things to be reviewed here. What the course is like, and what the underlying material is like.

The course, which comes in the form of a Macromedia Flash presentation, is very slick graphically, as can be seen from the illustration. The only real problem with it is that it is just like having someone talk a book at you. (In a very enthusiastic voice.) The graphics are good, but don't add a lot to the material. There's very limited interactivity (choosing different topics or information at various points) - the participant doesn't really have a chance to really try out the techniques within the framework of the course.

This is a problem. After many years of training in creativity, I am very aware that you can't LEARN creativity - you can learn a technique, but to become more effective creatively you have to practice. Any good creativity course will not just be a demonstration of techniques, but the opportunity to try them out - and this really doesn't happen properly.

ASIT Premier was accompanied by an 'Introduction to ASIT' ebook, which covers most of the material in the course, but was much easier to get the information out of. It really would be better to turn this into a full scale eBook (with type-in areas for worked examples etc.) or put a lot more interactivity (and less talking) in the Flash-based course.

So to the content. ASIT is a cut-down version of TRIZ. This simplification is very valuable as TRIZ is, frankly, over-complex. ASIT is much more practical, and addresses the same sort of scope. Broadly there are two types of requirement for creativity - engineering and real world. Engineering creativity works in a highly constrained environment, such as manufacturing (hence the 'engineering' term). Engineering problems are often best addressed by creativity that is similarly constrained - TRIZ's rule-based and limiting approach is ideal for this environment, as is ASIT.

However, and it's a big however, engineering creativity is not so good for real world problems - typically business problems, human problems, artistic creativity and so on. Here a much more open style is vastly more effective - the approach to creativity taken by everyone from Osborn and de Bono to von Oech and Kao.

Note that this isn't a criticism of ASIT. The system itself works superbly for what it is designed to do. ASIT (and TRIZ) is a classic 'designed for engineers, used by engineers' solution. But it isn't a universal solution to the need for creative thinking, and where I have real problems with the way it's put across is the disparagement of other forms of creativity. This is not good - the course writer is sadly confusing the need for boundaries with the parochial view that there isn't anything outside your borders.

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ASIT Premier is available for download from the Start2Think website.